Written by Adrian Pennington on Mar 26, 2025. Posted in General Interest

Truth is Power

In an increasingly polarised and heavily propagandised world, projects that shine a light on systems of oppression and exclusion has never been more important. We spotlight the perseverance of investigative filmmakers intent on bringing social issue documentaries to the fore.

 

A good documentary not only gives an audience what they expect, but also makes them curious about things that they don’t know about. Arguably an impact doc tackling complex social dilemmas has to work harder to do this, by translating curiosity into action.

“Impact docs are in danger,” warned Oscar winning filmmaker Roger Ross Williams at Sheffield Doc Fest. “Funding has dried up. Buyers are now looking for celebrity and true-crime and not social issue documentaries. It's a struggle.”

He said that added the “racial reckoning” following George Floyd’s murder in 2020, which bubbled commissions in “Black and race relations content”, was now over.

“Buyers aren’t interested in social activist documentaries like that anymore. The moment is up.”

Those that cut through are the product of filmmakers with a passion for storytelling, a journalistic approach to investigation and with the support of those like Williams in a position of power.

At a time when dog-whistle politics aim to separate us, filmmakers can use their distinct perspectives to chart a course toward community and healing.

“In a time when dog-whistle politics aim to separate us and erect social walls between us, filmmakers can use their distinct perspectives to chart a course toward community and healing,” Williams said.

He set up production company One Story Up to “nurture young and upcoming filmmakers from diverse backgrounds” and champion other activist work that takes the point of view of the “outsiders and underdogs”.

These are projects that don’t fall within the obvious categories of true crime, celebrity bios, and music docs. “We're telling the stories that mainstream media are refusing to tell because they're just not sexy or interesting enough,” Toni Kamau, producer, The Battle for Laikipia said at the event. “It underscores the need for the filmmaker to have a very personal connection to tell stories about social injustice.”

 

Williams’ own work included Emmy winning Life, Animated and Emmy nominated Traveling While Black and Apple TV+ series The Super Models. “As a child I was severely dyslexic,” he says, “so I learned to memorise everything visually. I was incredibly observant because of that, which helped when I became a journalist. Truth is power and once it’s out there, you can’t hide from it.”

For director Brett Story social activism docs are political cinema. “It’s asking you to think about the world we live in, why it takes the form it does and how it might be transformed,” she said.

“I believe that cinema works differently from a newspaper article, a book or a pamphlet. The magic of being invited into a space is like having something enter your body. It’s an emotional experience and a thinking experience, sometimes in complicated relationship to each other. I want a film to work on us outside of the space of just the information that we're receiving.”

Her film, Union, documented the first successful unionisation drive at an Amazon warehouse in New York. Up against a corporate superpower and with legal protections at a drastic low for workers, the odds are stacked against the founders of the fledgling union who remain unswayed in their beliefs in collective action.

Co-director Stephen Maing pointedly noted similarities in the media industry. He cited “corporate consolidations within the distribution landscape” as “narrowing opportunities for bold, independent new work.”

While Amazon Prime was never going to board, other streamers seemed reluctant despite Union winning a Special Jury Award for Art of Change at Sundance. So, producers Level Ground Production self-distributed the film in cinemas this autumn.

I learned to memorise everything visually. I was incredibly observant because of that, which helped when I became a journalist. Truth is power and once it’s out there, you can’t hide from it.

In The Battle for Laikipia directors Daphne Matziaraki and Peter Murimi observe an escalating conflict between Indigenous settlers and British-Kenyan ranchers clashing over land which looks like “The Lion King version of untamed paradise” according to Kamau. Matziaraki, who is white, had observed the tensions during time lived there. She was able to get the film off the ground with a Pulitzer Center grant before Ross Williams, who exec produced, put her in touch with Kamau and Kenyan director Murimi.

What began as a short film idea turned into a seven-year-long project and more than 300 hours of footage. “We are asking big questions about who gets to decide which resources they use and how we share our landscape especially when climate change is putting pressure on resources,” explains Kamau. “The editing process took more than two years because these decisions were very hard to make. We tried to make a film that was nuanced and we didn't want to make a film that would spoon-feed audiences. What kind of world do we want to live in?”

 

Canadian Emily Kassie made her first documentary aged 14, following gay students facing discrimination in religious high schools. “It was the first injustice that I witnessed up close,” she said. Since then, she’s traversed the world making short docs and telling visual stories about people caught in unjust systems and geopolitical conflicts. Her latest feature Sugarcane is in collaboration with fellow journalist Julian Brave NoiseCat and won them Sundance Documentary Directing Award.

I want a film to work on us outside of the space of just the information that we're receiving.

“It's about the horrors my own country had perpetrated against its first [indigenous] peoples. When the news broke in 2021 that there was potential unmarked grades on the grounds of one of my former kindergarten schools I felt a pull. I'm someone who acts on intuition and although we didn’t know what they would find, I knew we had to be there to tell the story.”

At the heart of their film, acquired by National Geographic, is this question of action. How do you act when faced with violence from the past? What does accountability look like?

A portrait of residents in a small southern US town facing the contentious legacy of the world's largest Confederate monument, which looms over their home, is the subject of Stone Mountain, also exec’d by Williams.

The town is 95 per cent black and for most of the year the landscape there is “picnics and walking trials” but for a few weeks it transforms into “a Confederate theme park and magnet for extremists,” says director Daniel Newell Kaufman.

“Once I had this image in my head I couldn’t shake it,” he said. “To me it summed up the surrealism of America and the dissonance between the stories told about our history and the reality.”

When the news broke in 2021 that there was potential unmarked grades on the grounds of one of my former kindergarten schools I felt a pull.

Kaufman, who is white from New York, spent three years filming in the town as delicately as possible talking with all sides.

 

“I wanted to paint a vivid three dimensional portrait of the place,” he says. “I felt conflicted because I was an outsider. I wanted to make sure if I did go tell a story I did it with respect and by listening. So I reached out to local people and those involved in activism who wanted the monument either removed or changed. They urged me to make the film. That sense of responsibility became the real compass for me.”

Although some of these titles have been picked up by major streamers, Williams argued that streamers “need to be educated to realise there is an audience for these films and that people are craving them.”

He added, “I am someone who shouldn’t have succeeded, who shouldn’t have made it in the world. For me, every documentary I make is personal. It’s my own personal struggle.”

 

This article was first published in the FOCUS 2024 issue of makers.

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